The Dime Store Floor

What did childhood smell like?

There’s a grove of tall white pines and blue spruces behind my house, in Connecticut, and the first time I walked into it I experienced a form of time travel: the trees smelled exactly like the summer camp I attended when I was thirteen, and for a moment I was transported to Florissant, Colorado, in 1968 and to the tent I shared for six weeks with four other boys. The tent was made of faded green canvas, and it had sides that we rolled up in nice weather, and it stood on a wooden platform. One afternoon, my tentmates and I decided that from then on we would do our urinating on the ground near a corner of the platform, in a shallow hole that we named the pee hole. We didn’t tell our counsellor, who was from Belgium, but the pee hole was near the head of his bed, and the weather was hot, and after a day or two he deduced what we’d been up to and told us, in a French accent, to knock it off. The trees behind my house smelled like the camp, not like the pee hole, but they brought back a lot of things I’d forgotten, among them the particular kind of musty warmth that radiated from the tent’s pyramidal roof when the sun was shining on it and I was (for example) lying on my bed reading comic strips that my mother had clipped from the paper at home and mailed to me, or trying to get more than two or three pages into our counsellor’s heavily underlined copy of “The Secular City.” The trees in my yard soon lost their power to send me back in time, however, as new associations replaced the old ones. Today, to me, my yard smells only like my yard.

I thought a lot about memorable odors recently, during a trip to Kansas City, where I grew up, because my sister, whose name is Anne, suggested that we visit a few places we remembered from our childhood, to find out whether they still smelled the same. Certain smells go all the way down to the core of memory, and encountering them again can set off reverberations. The first place she picked was one that had deep sensory links in both our brains: the medical building where our dentist’s office used to be. The drinking water in Kansas City wasn’t fluoridated until the nineteen-eighties, and when Anne and I were children cavities were so common that our dentist didn’t make separate appointments for fillings: he went to work with his drill as soon as he’d finished digging the impacted Milk Duds and Jujyfruits from between our molars, and he worked so fast that the Novocain was usually taking full effect only as he was finishing up. The smell that Anne and I now found in the hallway outside what had once been his office was familiar—volatile solvents and fear?—but was disappointingly faint, except when an orthodontist’s door opened as we passed and a woman and her grumpy teen-age daughter brought a gust of it with them as they exited. I hadn’t been in that hallway for more than thirty years, but in all that time its appearance had scarcely changed, and as we snooped around I rediscovered many things I’d forgotten, such as the old-fashioned typeface of the gold-leaf lettering on the dark wooden office doors (although the names on the doors were different). Outside, modern chain stores had supplanted the local businesses we knew when we were growing up, but the names of some of them came back to me, among them a boys’ clothing store called Schoenhard’s, where the elderly saleswoman, who fitted me for church pants by running her tape measure from the top of my shoe to my crotch, was named Miss Tingle.

The most enduring and evocative remembered smell from all our growing up, Anne and I decided, was the smell of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the objective of innumerable field trips. As we drove there, I could easily generate a mental simulacrum of its smell, a concentrated essence of antiquity, brass polish, school shoes, and institutional gravity. When I was three or four, my mother enrolled me in art classes in the museum’s basement, and on the first day she led me down a marble hallway and into a room filled with children I didn’t know. I remember the gray steel-and-Masonite stools we sat on, and the shallow tins of bubbly, earth-smelling red and green tempera paint, the first liquid paint I’d ever got to use. I was wearing corduroy overalls, and in the front of them my mother had cut a slit so that I could go to the bathroom without needing help with the straps—a clever innovation that, to me, was a source of embarrassment and dread. The hallway outside the art room had a powerful smell—as powerful as the smell of a doctor’s examination room—and that smell, I discovered during subsequent visits, was even stronger in other parts of the building and, especially, on the marble staircase outside the museum’s auditorium, one flight up.

Yet once Anne and I were back inside the building we could find no trace. The smell was gone from the basement hallway, gone from the marble staircase, gone from the auditorium itself, gone, even, from the gallery containing my favorite exhibit, the one of tiny carved-ivory cages and food dishes for crickets, from China. The Nelson underwent a major renovation and expansion a few years ago, and the old smell must have perished during the construction, annihilated by wallboard compound and modern building codes. In one hallway—which now had an alien scent despite looking exactly as I remembered it—I put my nose close to the gap between a locked door and its jamb, thinking that I might be able to whiff a vestige in the closet behind it. But there was nothing. And, eerily, today I can no longer reproduce the old smell in my mind—as though my knowledge of its extinction at its source had scoured it from my memory.

The next place we tried was a store that was called the Dime Store when we were children. It went out of business a few years ago but has been revived, in the same space, as the (New) Dime Store, by two people we knew when we were growing up. The original Dime Store was our favorite store and was the first distant destination I was allowed to ride my bicycle to, beginning in third grade. My usual route passed within a few doors of the house of a known bully, who had red hair and splotchy freckles and was a year or two older than we were. One day, two friends and I decided to rid ourselves of him permanently by luring him into my house, inviting him to sit in a chair on which we had placed some of the metal tracks from my electric train set, and quickly turning the train’s transformer to ninety, its highest setting. The transformer, when I was running my train, emitted a pleasing odor of ozone and smoldering Bakelite. I don’t remember how we planned to get the bully into my house, but, at any rate, our improvised electric chair didn’t work, as we discovered when we tried it ourselves.

As Anne and I drove to the (New) Dime Store, I predicted that the building’s interior atmosphere—which had once been flavored mainly by dust, plus a sort of comforting over-scent that was related to mildew in the same way that cognac is related to wine—would now be dominated by scented candles, and I was right. (Scented-candle displays, in stores, are olfactory kudzu.) In addition, the old wooden floor had been cleaned and sealed, changing not only its smell but also the pitch and timbre of its creaking. Nevertheless, much about the (New) Dime Store seemed gratifyingly familiar. There was a broad selection of notions, just as there used to be, and the candy and toy sections looked very much the same, although the items had evolved. Most of the toys that I used to covet were things that, nowadays, are considered health or choking hazards, or potential causes of injury or blindness: cheap slingshots (made of coated wire); expensive slingshots (made of wood); BBs; Greenie Stik-M-Caps and hard-plastic projectiles called Shootin’ Shells (for our Mattel Fanner-50s); red roll caps (for hitting with hammers—ideally, one full roll at a time, producing flame and a plume of acrid smoke); a specific type of plastic pistol and its pea-like ammunition; and model cars and their intoxicating glue, which hadn’t yet been reformulated to deter sniffing.

When Anne and I were children, and for a pretty long time afterward, the Dime Store was run by a man named Bob, who was a Christian Scientist. My father’s mother, whom we called Gaga, was a Christian Scientist, too, and when she died, in 1982, it was Bob, surprisingly, who conducted her memorial service, in a small wood-panelled room at a funeral home. Bob mainly read passages from the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, among them this one:

Nothing sensual or sinful is immortal. The death of a false material sense and of sin, not the death of organic matter, is what reveals man and Life, harmonious, real, and eternal. The so-called pleasures and pains of matter perish, and they must go out under the blaze of Truth, spiritual sense, and the actuality of being.

The service was attended by just my family and by Big John, a black man about my father’s age who for several decades had done yard work and various household chores for Gaga and whom we called Big John to distinguish him from my brother and, later, from my son—and perhaps also from Big John’s grandsons, John and Jonathan. When Bob began to speak, I tried to transport my mind into another dimension, so that I wouldn’t accidentally set off, in that small room, a chain reaction of coughing laughter. At “spiritual sense,” my wife dug her fingernails into my arm.

During the funeral of the mother of a friend of mine, the friend’s daughter, who was very young, peered into the open casket and whispered to her parents, “Grandma smells like paint.” For Gaga’s service, not even her ashes were present, and now, when I think of her, there is nothing from that day to obstruct my memory of the fragrances of her life: her perfume, very different from my mother’s; her extraordinarily soft and softly redolent arm skin; her beloved roses, a few of which my father transplanted into our yard after she died; the tooth powder in her bathroom; and, most of all, the concentrated storage-related vapors that filled the narrow closet by her front door. The smell of the closet was primarily the smell of my grandfather’s old Bell & Howell slide projector and its case, which was made of black alligator-y pasteboard and was lined with something like velvet.

Gaga lived to be ninety-two, despite never having had much conventional health care. Toward the end of her life, her mind began, very gently, to drift away. She would wrap small items in Kleenex and rubber bands, and hide them among mothballs in a drawer of her dining-room sideboard, and one day she set five places at her breakfast-room table: one in each of the usual positions and a fifth in the middle, where a centerpiece might have gone. “Who’s that one for, Gaga?” Anne asked. Gaga studied the table for a moment, then laughed, a little nervously, and said, “I don’t know!” Eventually, my parents moved her into a nursing home, but for a couple of years before that she lived in her own house with a paid companion, a squat old farmer’s widow who looked like Mr. Jeremy Fisher and spent most of her waking hours reading dire religious tracts. She made foul-smelling yogurt—on Gaga’s stove, in a contraption like a double boiler—and chewed with her mouth completely open.

My father died in 2004. At the moment of his death, my mother, my brother John, and I were on an airplane, flying back to Kansas City from the East Coast, where my mother had been visiting, having been told by my father’s doctors that nothing was likely to happen anytime soon. Anne and her husband, Mark, and her three sons, Charlie, Jamie, and Evan, were with him in his hospice room. He was unconscious when they arrived, and after they had sat with him for about an hour Anne sent the boys out to bring back hamburgers from Winstead’s—our favorite restaurant, as well as my father’s, and the first and last place I stop on any visit to Kansas City. The primary smell of a Winstead’s hamburger is a specific combination of pickle, mustard, and ketchup—a condiment grouping known to the waitresses as “P.M.K.”—as well as something indefinable about the bun, and it has never changed. While the boys were gone, my father’s breathing slowed and became more shallow, and, not long after they had returned and begun eating, it stopped altogether. Mark said, “Annie, I think he just died,” and my sister looked up and saw her middle son, wide-eyed, hamburger at his mouth, paralyzed in mid-bite. She said, “Jamie, chew.”

The day before my father’s funeral, Anne, our mother, our brother John, and I spent an hour or so driving around Kansas City, looking at and reminiscing about places where we and my grandparents and various people we knew used to live. More recently, on the day of the smell tour, Anne, our mother, and I drove much of the same route again. We were especially interested in the house my parents bought in 1961 and lived in until 1991. My mother knew that it had just been sold again, and she led Anne and me up the driveway and asked some housepainters if we could look around. Fairly often after my wife and I bought our house in Connecticut, the man who sold it to us would drive by, usually very slowly. I don’t think he knew that I recognized his car, an old blue Volvo. I always hoped he’d stop and ask for a tour, so that I could walk him through the rooms that we had gutted or stripped or painted over—to show him (uncharitably) how many of his own improvements we had obliterated. But he never came to the door, and after a while he stopped driving by.

Many people hate the idea of visiting a previous residence and discovering that strangers have vandalized the backdrops of their memories, but I like the successive jolts of disorientation and recognition. You study the kitchen’s new colors, cabinets, appliances, and windows, and try to remember where the sink and the dog bowl used to be, and suddenly you realize that the old pantry and the little entryway near the back door are gone, and that the room’s axis has been rotated ninety degrees—and then the old linoleum pattern pops into your head like the name of a forgotten classmate at a reunion. Scattered around the house and yard, like clues left by careless burglars, were fragments of our occupancy which had somehow outlasted almost twenty years of strangers’ renovations: an old-fashioned light switch with a small bulb set behind a circular opening in the chrome faceplate, to signal when the light behind the door had been left on, still fitted with the same burned-out red Christmas-tree bulb that was there when we were children; the cylindrical inground garbage container at the edge of the driveway, with its foot-pedal-operated steel lid, no longer in use, an artifact of the reeking fly-and-maggot era before Hefty bags; the garage door I’d pitched tennis balls against, with the square panel I treated as my strike zone. Each surviving detail was a pushpin holding the past to its easel.

As we were getting ready to leave, Anne went down into the basement, and then called up to me. She said, “The basement smells exactly the same.” That smell made such a deep impression on me when I was young that I can easily summon it now: a mixture of dust and damp and floor drain and plywood and clothes-dryer exhaust (which my mother filtered through an old nylon stocking or panty-hose leg that she rubber-banded to the end of a curving corrugated duct). When I went down the stairs, I saw that many things about the basement had changed: almost every permanent surface was painted gray, and the washer and dryer were gone, and the huge old asbestos-encased furnace—which, long before we moved in, had been converted from coal to gas—had been replaced by a device the size of a window air-conditioner. But the basement’s smell had survived somehow, as though childhood itself had been hiding out down there, miraculously still alive. My old dartboard was no longer hanging on a door, but I could see where it had been, a circular void surrounded by a corona of painted-over misses. At either end of the basement, high in the stone foundation wall, was an opening covered by a square screened panel the size of a small window. Each opening led into a dirt-floored crawl space, and when we first moved in I so hated to imagine what might be back there that if my thoughts ever strayed through the weave of either screen I had to stop what I was doing and run upstairs.

When I was young, I did better in our basement if I wasn’t alone. The woman who cleaned our house for my mother, on Mondays, sometimes did the ironing down there, neutralizing the crawl spaces. She was so fat that her wrists, elbows, knees, and ankles resembled creases rather than hinges, like the joints of a balloon animal. While she worked, she smoked Newports, and she turned her head and squinted to keep the smoke from curling into her eyes, watching the iron sideways, the way a robin watches a worm—first one eye, then the other. At the last possible moment before her curving ash got long enough to fall onto my father’s khakis, she would knock it into the lid of a mayonnaise jar which she kept at the apex of the ironing board. When I was thirty years old, and had finally stopped smoking myself, I realized with astonishment that what I’d always assumed to be the bouquet of a freshly ironed shirt was, in fact, the smell of stale cigarette smoke.

In those days, almost everyone’s clothes must have smelled of cigarettes, since almost everyone’s parents smoked. (My father’s timing rule for a perfectly grilled steak was “a cigarette a side”; he measured more protracted barbecuing projects in bourbons.) During parties at our house, a cloud like an inversion layer would fill the downstairs, and the next morning, when Anne and I went down to pour bowls of cereal for ourselves and wait for cartoons to come on, there would be overflowing ashtrays everywhere, and sodden cigarette butts floating in the bottoms of almost-empty beer glasses, whose sides were spider-webbed with dried foam. The nineteen-sixties were the golden age of smoky, inebriated parents. Once, while lurking at the edge of one of my parents’ parties, I looked across our smoke-filled living room and saw my father attempting to prove an old contention of his, that his navel was off-center. Some other grownups were studying his abdomen, which he had bared by raising his shirt, and then they raised their own shirts, to compare.

My own experience with smoking began in fifth grade. I would sneak Tareytons from my parents’ packs and take as many drags as I could stand, occasionally forcing myself to inhale. At camp in Colorado, my tentmates and I collected, dried, and did our best to smoke the leaves of a plant called bearberry, which grew everywhere and was known to us as Indian tobacco. Bearberry smoke was piercing and unpleasant, but we pretended to savor it. At home, my friends and I sometimes smoked cigarette-length pieces of dried grapevine, which we gathered and consumed mainly at a favorite hangout of ours, a vacant lot known locally as the Burned-Down House. (Grapevine smoke smelled and tasted like burning autumn leaves—suburbia’s dominant scent in October and November in those days, but one now made almost extinct by fire ordinances and gasoline-powered leaf blowers, which drone all day long throughout the fall, like aural background radiation. Autumn in the suburbs in the nineteen-sixties was a smell; today, it’s a sound.) In sixth grade, one of my teachers told us that smoking caused lung cancer and that we must never do it, advice I hated, because cigarettes were something I’d been looking forward to for almost as long as I could remember. These days, what amazes me the most about my smoking is all the places I was allowed to do it: on the “senior terrace” in high school; at the dinner table at home; in restaurants and college classrooms; on airplanes; in my bed at New England Baptist Hospital, in Boston, where I stayed for three days after badly breaking my wrist when I was a senior in college (the nurses emptied my ashtray).

One day when I was in high school, my mother’s mother, whom my siblings and I called Grandmother, took me to lunch at her country club. A couple of times during the meal, I excused myself and went to the men’s room to smoke a cigarette. Grandmother didn’t know that I smoked and (I learned later) assumed that I was going off to deal with what she usually referred to as “tummy trouble.” In her view, that was a bond between us, since tummy trouble ranked high on her own, lengthy list of ailments. When she found out later, by way of my mother, what I’d really been up to in the men’s room, she told me that I needn’t have hidden my cigarettes, and could have smoked in front of her. And from then on I did.

Grandmother was a Texas Episcopalian and a superstitionist. She touched wood and threw spilled salt over her shoulder, and if she saw a rabbit she tipped her hat and said, “How do, Brother Rabbit.” Her house smelled entirely different from Gaga’s—more like Listerine, Mentholatum, and antiques. For a while toward the end of her life, Grandmother had three nurses, who worked eight-hour shifts. One of them smoked cigarettes, and sometimes Grandmother would ask her to come into her bedroom and exhale under the canopy of her bed. She herself had never been a smoker, but the smell, she said, reminded her of my grandfather, who, by that point, had been dead for more than thirty years. Once, I opened a drawer in the little table next to her favorite chair, looking for a pencil, and discovered an ashtray in which she had stubbed out four Parliaments after taking one or two puffs from each—a furtive aide-mémoire.

Smoke aside, the house of nearly everyone I knew when I was growing up had a unique identifying odor, and if you’d blindfolded me and taken me to just about any of them I could have told you where I was. One smelled of the protective plastic covers on the furniture in the living room; another smelled of a kind of cooking that was horrifyingly different from my mother’s (it included, among other nightmare creations, grilled-cheese sandwiches made from pumpernickel bread and imported mustard and cheese that wasn’t orange); a third smelled of cleaning products plus wet German shepherds; a fourth, especially upstairs, smelled of older sisters. My own house, for me, was usually odorless, since its signature aromas had been smothered by familiarity, although there were exceptions: the basement, of course; the Chanel No. 5 my mother put on when she and my father were going out; the pipe that Big John always smoked as he worked at our house, on Thursdays, and that he placed in his pocket or on the kitchen counter beside his plate as he ate whatever my mother had made for him for lunch; our unfinished attic, where summer heat ignited the smell of my parents’ old leather suitcases; the aura of Old Spice aftershave and deodorant that followed my father downstairs, through the kitchen, and out the door when he was on his way to his office.

After Anne and I had concluded our smell tour of Kansas City and I’d returned to Connecticut, I went for a bike ride near my house, and at one point I passed eight or ten members of a girls’ high-school cross-country team. The girls were running in tight formation in the opposite direction, and they were chatting and laughing. The sky was blue. The air was warmly autumnal. As I passed the girls, I rode through the invisible trailing cloud of their mingled shampoo fragrances, and suddenly I felt a sort of dumbbell patriotism. My thought was something like: This is the tremendous strength of America—our vigorous, optimistic young people and their clean, clean hair. I also thought about how different those girls’ hair smelled from the hair of girls I knew when I was in junior high and high school, in the late sixties and early seventies. Certain hair products were popular then, and their scent became, for me, indivisibly linked with the idea of sex, and then with sex itself. And then, at some point, those products ceased to be used, as the fashion for fragrances changed. If one had known, at that age, about the accelerating grind of time, one could have bought a few bottles and placed them on a shelf somewhere, for later sampling and contemplation—once each spring, perhaps, or during the final moments of life. Yet how could one have guessed? Or maybe such smells never truly die, but survive in different products, or in hair-care formulations sold only in niche markets or Third World countries. Conceivably, one could be walking along a street in Havana or Addis Ababa someday and suddenly encounter a passing breeze of eleventh grade.

A few years ago, an online store I’d been using ran out of my regular brand of deodorant, and, because I was unable to think of anything else, I switched to Old Spice, the kind my father used. The container had changed, from the sturdy ivory tube I’d often seen in his medicine cabinet to a bright-red elliptical cylinder, but the name and, to a smaller extent, the smell imparted a mild hum of remembrance, and I never switched back. Just recently, while travelling, I found that I’d left all my toiletries at home, and went to a local drugstore to buy replacements. There I saw that Old Spice deodorant comes in more strengths, formulations, and scents than I had thought, and realized that the one I’d been using—High Endurance Pure Sport—couldn’t have been my father’s. I bought, this time, Classic Original Scent (the container of which was imprinted with a small picture of the old ivory tube and the promise “Original Round Stick Formula”). And when I used it for the first time, in my hotel room, I was almost knocked over by what I can only describe as a physical memory of my father. It was the smell of him driving me to school, and of him bending over to pull tight and tie the cord in the hood of my snow jacket, and of him fixing himself a drink in the pantry while he and my mother were waiting for dinner guests to arrive. So now the question is whether to stay with Classic Original Scent, thereby causing my brain to gradually overwrite my collection of father-related fragrance files, eventually making them irretrievable, or to set it aside and use it only on special occasions. ♦

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